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I wasn’t just dicking around on Batman Arkham Knight this winter. Most days I went off to a nearby cafe and plowed on with my next books. Here’s a short video updating you all on the current progress and giving a sneak peak at how they’ve turned out.

* Eagle-eyed readers will see I’ve removed my previous post “Tom Torero Street Hustle – Review”. We had a chat and came to a mutually agreed conclusion. Thank you for your spirited debate but that’s now closed.

I was feeling at that point that things were somewhat surreal. This was an entirely new experience to me. I had been going along for most of my adult life living from one day at the office to the next and going home to my monogamous relationship. Here I was tonight at one of the hottest parties in the city with the coolest group of guys and hanging out with a relatively hot young twenty-six year old. As I watched Mick make the rounds, making out with first one girl and then the next I was filled with a renewed desire to make this work. This is what I wanted and where I wanted to be right now. No more boring office life for me.

As the night laboured into early morning, Betty suggested that we go to another party at CentrePoint, the 27th tallest building in London that was built on the former site of a gallows. Companies such as the William Morris Talent Agency out of the States, Arabian and Chinese oil companies and EA games used some of the offices. Up on the 33rd floor a 360 degree viewing gallery offered spectacular views on London but, more importantly, to us there was a bar in the middle of it. It was a private member’s club at that time, although I believe that has changed in years since. Betty was able to get our names on the guest list that night and the rumour was that Beyoncé, who was on tour in London at the time was going to be hosting an after party. Feeling star-struck, I was having a hard time believing that this was my life. Or, more correctly, it was like peeling back the curtain on what may become my life.

The prior New Year I’d gone up to the roof of my apartment building with a cup of coffee and watched the fireworks with my wife. Then we’d gone back and watched TV. I hadn’t even changed out of my slippers. This was a different life.

As it turned out Jimmy and Betty were so lazy and disorganized that by the time we got to CentrePoint it was 3am. And if Beyoncé ever had been there she certainly wasn’t then. I looked under the tables just in case she was hiding. The party was wrapping up. Staff were stacking chairs and mopping the floor. We had time for one drink and that was it before they kicked us out.

Rakiya was hanging tightly on my arm, giggling at any little thing and as buzzed as I was. She’d not given me any trouble all night, never called her friends, never tried to take me to different bars. The whole time she’d just been pleasant company and let the night unfold. As we made our way down a quiet corridor right outside of the bar we started making out. It got pretty passionate and seedy as I pushed her up against a wall and started grabbing at her tits. My dick was hard and pressing up against her and she reached down and grabbed me through my pants. As things got more heated, a bouncer came along and moved us on.

“Hey kids, none of that here,” the muscled up, nicely dressed doorman told us, putting the brakes on my moves. I had to think fast, it was crunch time. No more bars, no more stalling. Time to pull the trigger.

“But how? How will I get her home now?”

The game plan then called for “extraction.” It simply means getting the girl from the spot of the entertainment to your home so that you can have sex. It was ten years since I’d last done it. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew that it had been a year since I’d had sex and I wanted to fuck this girl that night. I looked at her big ass and imagined slapping it as I rammed my dick into her. I looked at her dark brown skin and wondered how she’d look with my cum splashed all over it. I was so horny I would’ve fucked the Queen Mother.

I knew the Tube ran all night on New Year so I walked her to the station, stopping to make out and feel her up along the way. We got the Northern line south to my place. I was still thinking, “This is really going to happen. I’m going to be fucking this twenty six year old girl in less than an hour.” But then when the train stopped two stations before mine and she started to get off I got that sinking feeling.

I said, “Wait, where are you going? Come back.”

“I have to change trains here to get home,” she said. I was getting anxious again. “What do I do now?”

I simply said, “Just come on to my place and have a drink.”

“No, no, I have to get home,” she said.

I thought back again to what I was taught at the boot camp that I had attended back in July. She was showing me ASD—an anti-slut defence. That’s when the girl wants to have sex, but she feels guilty about it and wants the guy to take the responsibility for moving it forward, so she’ll throw up all kinds of obstacles. The crucial point is she is hoping the man will find a way to brush aside those objections so she can get the sex and still leave when it’s over feeling like things had progressed naturally. Remembering this, I quickly said, “It’s okay, we’ll just have a quick drink and then you can go. We’re not going to have sex.”

That did the trick. She got back on the Tube and I high-fived myself mentally. I was shocked and impressed with myself. It seems silly and trivial in the grand scheme of things, but this was a big thrill for me, being able to see the labours of my education come to fruition. We got off the tube at Kennington and were soon in my place. I was feeling great at that point, the voice in my head telling me that it was a done deal. I was going to get laid.

Once inside the apartment I poured her a drink, as promised. We never really finished it though. We were both kind of drunk and still hot and bothered from our earlier groping session. I started kissing her and, within minutes, dragged her into my bedroom. She wasn’t offering any resistance at this point. She was loving it and as ready to fuck as I was.

It was dark, and I didn’t turn on the lights. I fumbled with my mp3 player for soft jazz and the mood turned seductive as I slipped off her dress and tossed it to the floor and dropped my pants right next to it. She slid down my body while I reclined back on the bed and, as I watched her sucking my dick, I almost still couldn’t believe it was happening. I looked down and could see her dark skin and big eyes looking up at me with her decent fake titties bouncing around as she sucked on my cock and I thought, “Damn! This is really happening. I’m really going to get to fuck her!”

I got to have sex, finally, and it was good. We both enjoyed it but then things got weird afterwards. At this point, I was still messed up and broken inside from my divorce. There were still all kinds of strange personality quirks I hadn’t yet straightened out so, suddenly, I felt this intense need to “qualify”. Qualifying is more pick up jargon. It means trying to demonstrate to someone the reasons why they should like you. The best way to explain this would be to think about how on a first date the man typically looks at the woman as being higher value then himself. She’s the “prize” so to speak, and he needs to convince her that he is deserving. So, he’ll talk about how successful he is or how rich he is, anything to make her believe he is worthy. I was being overwhelmed at this point by the need to do this even though I’d already fucked her. It’s not logical. So I did something so weird and now once I thought back on it, so embarrassing.

I reached under the bed and I pulled out an A2 manila envelope. Within this envelope was my resume, my diplomas from my Bachelor’s and my Master’s programs, certificates and commendations from employers, and references. It was a package that I put together in order to obtain a job, or supply proof to Human Resources for a background check when taking a job offer. I began showing this stuff to her.

She was polite and attentive, but I know that she had to be thinking, “What the hell is wrong with this guy? Why is he showing me these five minutes after we had sex? This is just weird.”

She would have been right. It was bizarre in fact, and I know now that it was because I was in a place where I doubted myself to the point of not seeing my own value. I’ve discovered since that qualifying to a woman puts her in a place where instead of looking up at you she is staring down at you from her position of power. Women don’t want to be on a pedestal—they want to look up to and admire the man who is fucking them. The contrast to this is having the woman qualify to you, and that was a lesson I would learn at a later date.

So poor Rakiya probably started getting an icky feeling that maybe she’d slept with a man lower value than she’d presumed. Well, it’s only sex. I’d gotten my notch and finally broke the duck with Game.

Rakiya spent the rest of the night and left late in the morning. I never saw her again, and I’m not sure to this day if it was due to my peculiar behaviour, or if it was that she never really saw it as being more than a one-night stand. Either way, as I stood in my kitchen and poured my coffee that morning, I was smiling. I had a helacious hangover and my balls were aching from finally being relieved of their “blue-ball” state, but the smile on my face lingered throughout the day. I had finally gotten laid, and I had actually completed the process of meeting a stranger and then having sex with her in one or two days, from beginning to end.

The next morning I woke up to New Year’s Eve. I was still living in a grotty one-bedroomed flat in Kennington, a rundown area that felt more like Lagos or Kingston than the land of my forefathers. My housing estate had been built in the 1930s and probably never updated since. There were metal security bars welded across all ground floor windows in my block due to the crime problem—any time I read about a fatal stabbing or shooting in the London paper it was a fair bet to be nearby. The only reason normal working people lived there is it’s centrally located and cheap—I could walk to my banking job in just thirty minutes. Never underestimate the squalor of London living conditions. Despite earning near £100k per year the punitive taxation, mass immigration, bureaucratic incompetence and creeping socialism of London life meant I lived in a shithole. And paid £1000 per month for the privilege.

It was usually fun times with the RSG gang

This was far from the best time in my life. Working like a dog fortyeight weeks a year, having seventy percent of my income stolen from me by an assortment of taxes so that I could live in a squalid damp flat and sleep in the bed that I’d shared with my wife less than a year earlier. And I wasn’t getting laid.

I’d think, “Is that all there is?” I’d worked hard at school, graduated University top of my faculty, gone straight into a high-pressure high-achievement professional apprenticeship and then risen up the corporate ladder through dedication, talent, and a little good luck. Yet here I was, almost thirty-five years old, single, and living next door to a workshy immigrant family who had exactly the same apartment as me but paid for it with welfare funded by taxes stolen from me while I paid the full market rate. Just a week earlier the council had replaced the windows of every apartment except those of the people who actually paid their own rents. So the immigrants had new double-glazing and I had draughty single-glazing.

I’d done everything society asked of me and done it well. Yet here I was, living in squalor, alone, with no idea where it had all gone wrong. Dark thoughts filled my mind back then. The only faint light of hope in my life was this secret system of Game. Looking back it sounds silly to be so pessimistic but having your heart broken and then enduring a twelve-month dry spell will do that to a man. That’s where my obsession would come from, the driving energy that would eventually turn my life around.

It was decadent but perhaps not how they meant it to be

New Year’s celebrations bore me. Being somewhat introverted, the idea of being at a party or a club where it was standing room only was not enchanting to me in the least. Neither were the obnoxious mark-ups on the cover fees and drinks in London bars. But, like I said earlier, I was new to this journey. I had become friends with some of the RSG guys and keen to cement it. They were the “cool guys” and I wanted to continue to broaden my social circle and be a part of their group. The longer I hung out with them, the more I could learn. In those dark days it was a lifeline, what felt like my one shot at happiness. My new friend (and leader of RSG) Jimmy had invited me out for New Year’s Eve with a group of the guys. So I went.

The plan was to meet up at a Shoreditch bar-club called “The Last Days of Decadence.” Shoreditch is renowned for its party scene, frequented by a diverse demographic, mostly hipster twats. Last Days is a throwback to the Roaring 20s prohibition era from the stained glass windows to the cherry wood bars it’s an exercise in old school indulgence, like a bar from Boardwalk Empire. It encourages retro evening formal dress. After a few stiff whiskeys I’d feel transported back in time, the perfect atmosphere for ringing in the New Year.

I sent Rakiya a feeler text to see where I was at with her. Men who are new to Game are usually shocked at the flake rate—the amount of girls who will give a phone number then never reply. Even now when I’m pretty good and know how to solidify a number I still expect at least half of the girls to flake. Back then it was closer to ninety percent so even though the energy and sparkle had been good on the street I wasn’t expecting much. I sent this: “Hey Jimmy. I just met this Nigerian girl. She’s cute and sexy but looks like one of those sex perverts you warned me about. Should I date her?”

She understood the joke and responded almost immediately.

“Hahaha, you should be careful! I recommend you run away from her.”

We pinged a few messages quickly and my spirits rose. So many recent interactions had been a waste of time but this one stuck. She had high interest. I also found out that she lived quite close to me. A few hours passed, and as I was showering, my phone vibrated. Wiping my hands dry on the towel, I reached out from the shower cubicle and checked my messages.

“What are you doing tonight?”

Fucking score! Not only was she fishing for a date invitation (an extremely strong sign of interest for a girl, due to them usually taking a passive role) but she was trying to spend New Year’s Eve with me—one of the few get-drunk-and-damn-the-consequences nights of the year. I was almost shaking in anticipation.

I replied something or other and she called. After some quick chit-chat I told her about the evening plans.

“That sounds like a lot of fun,” she told me.

“I think it will be. Why don’t you join us?”

“I’d love that,” she said. I could tell by the sound of her voice that she was excited.

“Great!” I told her. We arranged to meet up near the Imperial War Museum an hour later, then I scrambled to get ready.

Jimmy lived just a couple of minutes’ walk away from me, also in a squalid little two room flat with his mate Tomasz, also an RSG guy. It was funny to be on the inside and see how these guys really lived. Jimmy and Tomasz spent most of their time sitting around in their boxer shorts and watching DVDs on their laptops. It was as if they turned on a different persona when they walked out the door. We had a can of beer each, then I popped out to collect Rakiya. She was all smiles and warm energy, so I took her to Jimmy’s then we got a cab into town.

Last Days was predictably jam-packed. It was like stepping into the 1920s—if that era had also been popular for trashy tattoos, binge drinking, and obesity. It’s jarring to see a chubby foul-mouthed English woman swilling cocktails while dressed like Marlene Dietrich. That’s how my vibe was in 2009—whereas now I find beauty in everything back then it seemed like British culture was a festering sore rotting through a once-great nation. At least the music was good.

Rakiya was dolled up in a yellow dress and with her dark hair and skin she looked very cute in it. Like a big sexy banana. I’d noticed she was a bit chubby, but her smile and her youthfulness were nice and it was so long since I’d gotten laid I wasn’t being too selective. In addition, I’d never shagged a black girl, unless you count a quickie with a prostitute in Prague five years earlier. Game is great for satisfying sexual curiosity.

We shuffled through the crowds until finding the rest of the team. Jimmy brought along an older woman he’d been banging because she was a famous songwriter and producer in the US. Betty was blonde and slim but pushing forty and pretty haggard from all the booze and cigarettes. Not really a catch, you might say. Jimmy wanted to get his band signed while I got the impression that Betty was using him for the bad boy sex. Jimmy was a decent looking thirty-one year old guy. Imagine Liam Gallagher, the wild and moronic frontman of Oasis, and then turn the volume down a little. Jimmy was astute, talented, but also slothfully lazy and not willing to put out the effort to reach his full potential.

Also with RSG that night was Mick, an Australian raconteur gifted with the ability and wit to tell a story that would have the entire room spell-bound. Mick was always the life of the party. He had held down a wide variety of jobs in his twenty-eight years of life ranging from a croupier on a cruise ship, a ski instructor to faking his resume to land an accounting contract. That gave him fodder for quite a few of his tales. He was definitely an extrovert and very good with the ladies.

Tony was the other guy there. He was the grand old man of RSG despite being my age. We all looked up to him because of his experience and deep knowledge of the crimson arts. He’d been a Salsa performer and railed over three hundred women. Even then he was in great shape and projected a solid masculine presence.

An hour passed and whiskey flowed. A burlesque dancer was cavorting across the small raised stage wiggling her hips and showing skin. By my third whiskey her breasts had been freed from their velvet prison and she was dancing the Charlestone. I was walking Rakiya to the basement bar when Mick came over and grabbed me.

“Nick, do me a favour. I want you to use your pre-selection to help me pick up one of these girls.”

When women see a man out with a pretty girl, they look at him differently than if he was alone or with male friends. Deep in their hindbrain women have short-cuts to assess a man’s sexual market value and one is “since he was able to score this pretty young thing there must be something about him, something that I’m missing out on.” Thus, one great way to make women interested in you is to be seen with a pretty girl on your arm. We call this “pre-selection.”

Mick continued, “I’m going over to talk to those girls”. He nodded his head towards a group of three young girls standing against the bar. “Wait for me to open, then walk past with Rakiya and say to the girls, ‘Be careful of this guy here, he gets laid like a rock star.’”

I agreed, thinking of it as helping out a friend while continuing my learning process. Each time I saw Mick with a girl I went over and gave him this verbal pat on the back. More whiskey blurred my mind. Things were going great—we were swapping stories with the RSG guys, drinking, lots of ribaldry. Mick was copping off with some girl in a dark corner while Rakiya was pressed up against me all night, coming on to me. I’d already kissed her.

There’s a nightclub area in the basement that serves drinks and also has a stage where they do a bigger cabaret show. The toilets are just to the side of the stairs and, as we were coming down, I saw Mick. He was coming out of the women’s bathroom with a giggling girl close behind. She scurried off with a guilty expression, and he stopped when he saw me.

“I can’t believe it! I just got a blowjob in the toilets,” then he grinned broadly and said, “Cheers for the help!”

The inner lining of my brown biker boots had ripped so a little fold of material was pressing against my ankle and the left heel was asymmetrically worn away from many weeks pounding the streets. The toes of my sock were wet from stepping on a loose paving slab that splashed water as it wobbled underfoot. These are the trivial annoyances of winter daygame—the hobby of prowling busy shopping streets to pick up beautiful women gets tougher when the weather turns. I’d been out four days straight through wind, rain, and snow. It was beginning to wear on me.

Covent Garden was wet and dreary that day. I had an enthusiastic young student in tow. He was a young, nerdy, socially awkward kind of guy with an unkempt shock of black hair combed unconvincingly over a thinning crown. The kind of guy you’d expect gets laid about once a year maximum. He was upbeat and anxious to learn, so I was taking him around for free. I wasn’t really qualified to teach but I’d opened about one thousand girls and was at least getting some dates, so LSS guys even less successful than me wanted to hang out.

I pulled up the collar of my fur-lined flight jacket and pulled my woolly hat down to my eyebrows, then jammed my numbing hands deep into my pockets. It was December 30, 2009. A cold, damp typical wintery London day, New Year just around the corner. Christmas decorations cluttered store windows, long streams of golden tinsel framing displays of snowmen and reindeer. As dusk approached, the fairy lights adorning lampposts and street signs began twinkling in the reddening sky. Everywhere I turned people were milling, jostling, and scurrying for that last sale item. Some rushed purposefully to and from their destinations as others strolled along dreamily, shopping the stores with their eyes, or watching as the street performers put on a show for their pleasure and their tips. Lovers strolled hand-in-hand and looked at the sights. Japanese tourists with comically oversized cameras took pictures of everything.

This seasonal fauna of street life was a blur to me. My attention was on the fold of cotton pressing awkwardly against my ankle, and whether I should find a seat to take my boots off and fix it. Little things loom large when daygaming due to the high pressure of the activity.

Covent Garden in winter

I was sold on daygame now. I loved that there was an art to meeting a girl in a public place and getting her number, perhaps taking her for a coffee there and then. It’s the first step in getting laid. For most men it’s a strange, intimidating but fantastically liberating experience—just imagine walking around the streets scanning for pretty girls and then, when you see one, you just walk up and make a conversation from nothing. Make her laugh, make her curious, and hopefully fuck her a few days or weeks later. For a guy conditioned that bars, nightclubs, and Internet dating sites are the only places to meet women this is an eye-opening thought.

Any girl. Anywhere. Any time.

I was still somewhat new to the game, having stumbled and mumbled through what was now six months of approaches. I had yet to get laid, but I had gotten some basic competence at drawing girls into conversation and getting numbers. Sometimes the girls would even come on a date. That’s what my student was looking for that day. I was still hurting from my devastating divorce from a woman with whom I’d shared the past nine years. We had dated for six and were married for three before she walked out on me that January. By the time I was trawling these Covent Garden streets at the end of the year she had already remarried.

It was almost a year since the separation, and over six months of Game. I was reflecting on the year, as we are wont to do when New Year approaches. Was I headed in the right direction? I’d initially promised myself a six-month commitment to Game to see if it worked and if I could learn it. So how was it working out?

In the early months of 2009 I allowed myself to wallow in the unfairness of it all. The self-pity that comes from being dumped enveloped me. Outwardly, I was the same guy I had always been, but inside I had been smashed into a million pieces, like a jigsaw box emptied onto the floor. I was glad I’d tried something, lest I allow myself to sink deeper into the pits of despair.

I thought back to the Tony Clink book I’d picked up and then reordered earlier this year. A gaudy red book with cover art of a slick lounge-lizard guy surrounded by beautiful women. It promised the secret system to meet and attract women, sleeping with different girls every week. So, although married and in love at the time, I read it from idle curiosity, and it had stung. It’s like the author knew my whole life. I replayed memories of all the girls I’d dated, laid, or failed with and every single time I could relate it to his system. I believed him. Then I loaned the book to a friend and forgot about it.

In business I was successful, having always been at the top of my class from the time I was four years old right through my Master’s program. Every single year I came top at everything. Soon London beckoned and a career in investment banking. I was so focused on professional advancement that I never noticed the lack of women around me. I’d just stumble into a relationship and gave it little more thought. Wolf of Wall Street it wasn’t. I wasn’t one of those rare guys who had girls throwing themselves at him an university and thus graduated with a First Class degree in Entitlement.

As my student and I strolled along through the busy streets, talking to a girl here and there, I suddenly heard someone singing flutter in the wind behind me. A sweet, feminine, melodic voice seemed to tinkle like water in a mountain stream. It was so sweet and uplifting. I turned to look and behind me walked a pretty young black girl. She was wearing a set of headphones, singing along with the music. I smiled and turned back to my student, and almost at once wondered what I was doing. I couldn’t ignore this opportunity. Today I was the teacher, but I was still in the game myself, and she looked like someone that I’d really like to get acquainted with on a horizontal and naked basis.

Turning back towards the girl I motioned her to take off the headphones. She gave me a wide-eyed inquisitive look, but obediently took the buds out her ears and returned my smile.

“Did you really just start singing in the street?” I said.

She smiled again and giggled a bit. “Yeah, I like this song.”

Her brown eyes were large and her long hair hung in curls to her shoulders. She looked to be in her early to mid-twenties. I would find out later that she was twenty-six. My eyes scanned up and down. Decent height, full breasts, wide hips, quite possibly a good ass. She’d do.

“People may think you’re crazy,” I challenged. “The only people I see singing to themselves are also carrying a can of Special Brew.”

It was easy. She was in a great mood and she liked me. My student stood off quietly to watch me work, absorbing what he could. I teased a little, and she laughed. I could feel a spark of attraction between us like the crackle of electricity. Something undefinable in her eyes and manner telegraphed, “I want this guy.” Back then, I was actually terrible at picking up on such signals but she was throwing them out so strongly I couldn’t miss.

“I have to get back to my friend there,” I told her, “But let me take your number and we can have a drink sometime.”

That is how I met Rakiya, a young medical student of Nigerian descent but born and bred in South London. She’d be the first black girl I’d ever fucked. Her number stored in my phone I bid her goodbye and strolled away, re-joining my student with a smile on my face. Perhaps this curvy minx would be the one to finally end my year-long dry spell, and allow me to complete the whole daygame process from beginning to end.

The grind continued all through September. I took a week off work to spend ten straight days daygaming, ten sets a day minimum. There’d been too much half-assing it, so I wanted massive action. Mental pressure was willing me out because deep in my gut was a sickening dread at being blown out by a procession of girls and perhaps peering into the abyss—that I’d never get good at this. Eugenia had inadvertently knocked my confidence. So every day that week I followed the same ritual, trying to impose the illusion of control onto the scenario.

I’d go to a Caffè Nero and sit on the big brown leather sofa watching the Blueprint Decoded instructional videos on my laptop until my sexual desire/desperation overcame my anxiety/avoidance. For example, the first day:

Monday 14th September. My mind was full of big plans and motivational self-talk. No excuses, I was going to turbocharge my stats on approaches. It didn’t matter how I felt, or if my wings were busy, I’d go solo and just plow through. Received wisdom in the community is you are a noob until you’ve completed one thousand sets. I was at about four hundred and very impatient to improve. Having a full-time job restricted my daygame to weekends so the solution seemed obvious— take time off work.

I’d spend the first hour in Caffè Nero reading. It was still not quite lunch time and Covent Garden was deserted so I didn’t feel like I was descending into avoidance. Finally, I stepped outside and straight into a hot Belgian dancer. I opened weakly, but she stopped and chatted. She was in a hurry to get to the Pineapple Studio for a dance class. I knew something about that stuff so I rambled on about dance, contemporary dance, how my dancer-ex had a careless grace in her movements from all the dancing. Blah, blah, blah. She was not interested, and my attempt to take her number led to an awkward refusal.

It only took a few minutes to shrug that off, and I saw a dusky Mediterranean girl walking through the market. She stopped briefly but either didn’t speak English or was seriously unimpressed. She smiled, waved her hand dismissively, and disappeared without a word. Next was an English girl carrying shopping boxes. She didn’t stop, but smiled, thanked me, and said she was late getting back to work. One more open got me a stop but nothing doing.

Damn. My forehead actually felt tight, such was my poor state. It was like the skin was too tight for the size of my skull. I’ve since learned that is how to recognise when I’m pulling the “creepy face” caused by poor state.

I persevered. On Shaftesbury Avenue just past Forbidden Planet an Asian girl came towards me. She was young, and had just started her first day as an intern in a fashion magazine. We chatted a bit. I was too talky and too outcome dependent, but she didn’t seem to care. She checked the text she was writing as I approached, so I told her off for not paying attention. She giggled and twirled her hair. I made a mental note to self–set arbitrary boundaries and playfully tell a girl off for breaching them. She gave me her number but never replied to my texts.

Another instant date to nowhere

I got myself blown out a few more times on Oxford Street before a hot English girl gave me her Facebook. It was weird because the whole time I was thinking she was wanting to get away, and I was struggling and just talking into the space, yet it was five minutes or more in conversation and after getting her Facebook I kept her another few minutes talking about her Geography Uni course she was about to start her second year in. It didn’t go anywhere. It’s common for beginners to think the length of the interaction is directly related to how strong the resulting contact details will be. This isn’t correct. Ultimately, you’re trying to create a particular emotional impression upon the girl while also ticking off checkboxes marking particular signals she needs to give you to show she is available and into you. If you accomplish that in two minutes the number will be stronger than if you dither around chatting for twenty minutes but fail to accomplish it. So while advanced day gamers can quickly take solid numbers (or eject when it’s not forthcoming) it’s common to see beginners getting dragged into over-long conversations that go nowhere.

The last approach of the day was a pleasant failure. I opened a hot Lithuanian in Carnaby Street. She was ambling around aimlessly, which I took as a generalised approach invitation. My forehead was really tight, and I was having a tough time. My vibe was horrible, but I was determined to just press on and grind out the sets. She stopped, smiled, hair twirled, and indulged me for ten minutes. I could almost visualise a hologram of a graph between us showing a downward slant as I continued to lose my confidence throughout the whole thing. I tried to take her number and she was very explicit: “I don’t want to exchange details”. Fair enough, on that performance she really shouldn’t have.

I was getting some good reactions but no success

The first day of my daygame “vacation” resulted in talking to ten girls, taking one number, and one Facebook. Neither of those two girls replied to me. At the end of each day I’d analyse the work and write a blogpost of my learning points. Self-diagnosis is a crucial skill for seducers because no-one else is going to help you. Quoting my blog, this is what I felt I’d learned:

I felt crap but took right action anyway. Good work.

Even with shit state I still had good enough fundamentals to get one decent number.

I didn’t worry too much opening sets. The poor state was once in-set. Only a few months ago I wouldn’t even open five sets when in good state.

While in set I knew consciously all the mistakes I was making, even as I couldn’t stop making them. The biggest one was outcome dependence. I really wanted to get numbers and was worried the girls would walk away and leave me feeling shit.

Lesson learned. Back out tomorrow.

It was also this week that I went to an LSS talk at London Bridge on “game for men over 35” organised by a guy called Curran. It seemed perfectly pitched to me, but I was so lacking in entitlement that I worried I’d be refused entry because at the time I was thirty-four. I actually emailed Curran a few days before to ask if it was okay. As if they’d check my passport and throw me out!

The event was unremarkable, held in an upstairs function room of a pub by Tower Bridge. About thirty older gentleman packed the pews while a short ginger guy called London Playboy gave a talk, then Curran and then a lanky Scotsman with the online pseudonym of Skeletor. His real name is Colin and, though neither of us knew it then, he’d become a major figure in my journey. At the time I was very impressed with his presentation about identity and how to change it. I tried to get pally with him afterwards on his smoke-break but there was a ring of eager older gents two-deep around him that I couldn’t penetrate.

She was really pleasant, asking me about the opener, and do I do this much. I was hyper-honest in what I said (though I withheld the sheer scale of my approaching and subsequent failure-rate) saying, “I’m a fairly direct guy. When a man approaches a woman it’s always based on a sexual dynamic. I see no reason to try to sneak in under her radar.” She suggested I could be a little more roundabout, like asking her something normal.

“Yeah, I suppose, but that’s not me. Give me some feedback then. How did you feel when I said that?”

She smiled again. “It was kinda shocking… but cool.”

Ever the motor-mouth, I continued, “It looked simple but there’s a lot going on there. When a man stops a woman he’s got to demonstrate value without scaring her or being creepy. It could’ve sounded really weird, but instead I was just putting the option out there. I wasn’t trying to persuade you to have sex. I put it out there as non-needy. I like sex, but I don’t need it.”

She was called Eugenia. We swapped numbers and after she walked off she called me two minutes later to check that she had the right number stored. She’d briefly mentioned a boyfriend in passing, and that she lived in Covent Garden. She suggested I join her in a bar after I was done in Tiger Tiger nightclub later that evening. We swapped texts the rest of the day:

Me: You’re still thinking about it 😉

Her: A little! Doesn’t happen often in London!

Me: But all the time in Greece? I’m at Tiger Tiger.

Her: Yea, Greece is a little bit different. I’ve just hopped into the bath…

I later realised what was really going on in the subtext of this interaction. Girls have a dual mating strategy that is commonly summarised as “Alpha Fucks Beta Bucks”. This means they pursue both high quality male DNA and also long-term protection and provision. This gives the player his hack, his way in. Girls are hard-coded with the potential to step out on their long-term partners in order to access better DNA. They’ll call it an “indiscretion”, a “mistake” or an “adventure” but the important point is that it happens.

The London Daygame Model is designed entirely around exploiting this quirk of female nature. However, in September 2009 the LDM didn’t yet exist, and I didn’t know about Alpha Fucks Beta Bucks. My proposition to Eugenia had identified me as the consequence-free adventure sex guy and she was showing herself amenable to a secret liaison, with the usual trepidation and cautiousness before proceeding. I just lacked the wherewithal to pull it off. These days I’m all over it, but back then she was one who got away.

I left it for the week and then on Thursday a hot Colombian girl blew me out on an early evening date. I called Eugenia. She picked up right away and after a five minute chat she invited me to Bar Salsa saying her male friend was teaching there but she wasn’t dancing, so why didn’t I join her. I should’ve agreed, but I didn’t have the confidence to enter her territory and hold my frame. I envisioned myself being tooled by more charismatic men who know everyone in the class, being excluded from conversations she had with her friends and other silly social nightmares. It was a mistake. I should’ve just thrown myself into the mix to see what happened.

Next, while out the following day, I restarted, late on while I was in Cargo. The whole time I was trying to follow PUA text game advice, particularly the maxim from Roissy’s blog—send only those texts which you’d be comfortable having appear on a jumbotron in front of the whole world. Meaning, if you aren’t comfortable with your text game being public, it must be weak.

Me: Old Street tonight.

Her: I’m off to the cinema tonight but could meet up later if ur around.

Me: Yeah, that’s a plan. Text me when you’re done.

Her: OK.

Her:*later* Would you like to meet in Covent Garden or is it too late for you?

It was 11pm. I called. I said I’d be finished with my friends at midnight and then I’d call to arrange to go over to her place (she was home). Midnight came, I called and no answer. Twice. I texted, “hey” to no response. Fuck.

Next morning at about 11am I got this:

Her: Hey Nick – I’m so sorry about last night! I fell asleep in front of the tv, didn’t realise how tired I was.

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in a speech by Brutus in Act IV, gives a beautiful conception of Alpha Fucks: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune…” Whereas the Beta Bucks guy is omnipresent with his provision of attention and resources (she was living with her boyfriend) the girl’s Alpha Fucks needs rise and fall like the tide—and specifically with her monthly ovulation window. She’ll only have a tiny window within which motive, method, and opportunity are aligned to sneak out for adventure sex. As a player you need to be alert for that and take her at the flood.

I’d missed my chance.

We arranged a date for later in the afternoon. I was already in town, sitting in Caffè Nero off Covent Garden reading Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. I wanted to be in a state where I was self-amused and not anxious for her to come. Every date felt like entering a math exam and I needed to micro-manage my mood. She arrived and we sat outside in the sun. I was leaning back, trying to show “alpha” body language, and we connected instantly. I really liked this girl. She was smart, selfassured, and much prettier than I had first realised. It turned out she was a model and had recently has been posing naked for artists. She was also a dancer. We chatted a lot, and I kept with the authentic honesty.

This was still during the period of my voracious reading of all things seduction and psychological, so I’d also gotten a book on speed-reading people. We discussed that, and Eugenia really lit up when I outlined her character according to the book’s model.

She suggested moving on to St James’ Park so off we went. I initiated touch with upper arm touching, pulling her in with my arm around shoulders, and later around her waist. She pleasantly stayed comfortably close but didn’t respond by putting her arms around me. Again this was something of a calibration error. It’s generally a bad idea for the “secret sex” guy to be touching his girl in public—that’s exposing her to the risk of being caught, and undermining the whole secret society vibe. Except for fleeting moments to spike her energy levels, touching should be restricted to private environments.

I ended up talking about my interest in social dynamics and about the alpha/beta/omega male hierarchy, and sexual chemistry. She was going along with it all. I teased a bit, we joked. It was just very, very pleasant. I felt totally relaxed as if there was no judging between us, and I wasn’t trying to impress.

This experience would be the beginnings of a flavour I’d later successfully add to my pick-ups. I was trying to be as authentic and radically honest as possible, even overtly discussing the nature of malefemale interactions. This is now integrated into my instructional guides as “breaking the fourth wall” in which you discuss the meta-level nature of your own discussion. It’s highly effective in getting girls to quickly agree to sex, but in 2009 I was just fumbling in the dark with little idea it was to become a sophisticated tool. I’d recommend beginners avoid that stuff entirely.

Three hours in and we were sitting outside another cafe when I tried to escalate a bit more and fumbled a key test. While I tried to pull her in, she resisted, put down her sandwich and said, “You know I have a boyfriend?”

Ah, I thought. I’ve read a good answer to this on the Internet! I looked her dead in the eyes and with a low even voice replied, “I don’t care.”

The effect wasn’t what I’d hoped. She took a few bites of her sandwich then told me, “Well I do. It’s his flat I live in. I just don’t want to mislead you.”

I tried to keep a brave face, but I was crushed. I’d thought I was in. This was a beautiful, smart girl, a dancer, and the very first thing I’d said to her was a proposition for sex. And now I was in the friendzone! LJBF’d from the Apocalypse Opener… just let that sink in for a moment.

The reality was I’d had my chance and blown it. She’d asked me to walk with her a minute after my opening proposition, she’d invited me out to a bar, she’d invited me to her home late at night while her boyfriend was out (but fell asleep, at least that wasn’t so much my fault), and then accepted another date. Wannabe-seducers would likely interpret this story as her just being a games-playing cocktease who wanted to tool me for attention and, unfortunately, that’s the conclusion I came to.

But it was wrong. She wanted Alpha Fucks, and I’d come up short. Even at this last test about having a boyfriend, I’d misread it. She didn’t want to mislead me into thinking there’d be a relationship, but I’d misinterpreted her to be refusing sex and putting me in the friendzone. Even at that late point in the interaction if I’d had a stronger sense of entitlement and stronger escalation I could’ve taken control and got her into the bedroom.

It’s natural when recounting stories to focus on the success and compress all the boring bits so you can get to the highlights. That’s what good story-telling is and when out in the pub with your friends it’s a sure way to a fun night. When you’re telling pick-up stories this compression has a few side-effects:

It sounds like you’re having nothing but success;

The listener gets insanely jealous at the thought everyone is getting laid more than him.

People hate the idea that they’re missing a trick. Pretty much every spam email offer that lands in your inbox is based on this psychological quirk, and thus they promise you the ONE EASY STEP to lose weight/ get a bigger dick/make your first million/bang hot chicks. Usually it’s some kind of new underground secret that “they” (the powers-thatbe) don’t want you to know but, for a limited time period, you have a chance to discover the secret.

Funnily enough, they aren’t far from wrong. They are almost right, but for the wrong reasons.

Most men really are missing a trick with women, there really is a “secret system” (or more correctly, some simple principles), and the powers-that-be really don’t want you to know it. The part where the Internet marketers tell a rather fat lie is about it being one easy step. It’s more accurate to call it four years of pain and struggle.

But let’s consider the Availability Fallacy, which states that information which is readily available to you will be given a higher priority and loom larger in your mind than information that is less readily available.

Philosophy departments have been teaching this one in Informal Logic classes for decades. As it relates to pick-up, you’ll tend to over-estimate the victory stories people parade in online forums and marketing letters and under-estimate the failure stories that you may have to dig about for to find. I’ll tell you right now that in the time period covered by this volume of my story, I failed with over two thousand women.

One easy step

But unless I hammer the point home, you’ll forget that by the end of this chapter. You’ll focus on the lays and get the impression I was slaying right-and-left with wild abandon. Don’t say I never tried to convey the failure rate! So let me really drive home the point that game, for an average-looking man, is a grind. Failure is the base state and successes are rare blips that get creamed off to form the War Stories anthology.

I was hitting the streets every weekend throughout the summer and autumn of 2009 practicing the same direct opener time after time. On any given day I’d talk to between five and twenty girls, taking a couple of numbers and perhaps having an instant date (taking the girl onto a date immediately from the street interaction, without a break in between). Sometimes I’d get them out on dates later, but they’d go nowhere.

It was frustrating.

By September I hadn’t been laid for eight consecutive months, and I’d only kissed one girl. I’d probably spoken to about four hundred of them and had a dozen or so dates at least. It was always the same pattern— she’d turn up to the date quite keen and then gradually lose interest in direct proportion to how well she got to know me. They’d never seem to be in the correct position for me to go for a kiss and, if I ever tried to bridge the gap, I’d get artfully rebuffed. I pored over forums, books, and instructional videos but couldn’t get anything to work.

To be fair, there was no good instructional material out there for dates. The PUA literature that gave direct practical advice was focused entirely on the initial meeting in the bar or club. Once you had the phone number you were left to flounder with just a few simple highlevel principles. That’s all changed now, and there’s some excellent “date game” material that breaks it down to micro-level actionable advice. But in 2009 it was all shit.

The biggest problem, though, was my ineptitude. I didn’t have any confidence that I knew how to move a girl towards sex (“escalation”) and I didn’t feel attractive. I’d go on dates thinking I still needed to convince girls to like me and my lack of self-belief would seep out. I still had all the broken pieces jangling around inside, the after-effects of divorce. But I was impatient to get laid, so I kept reading, and eventually I stumbled upon a blog post describing the Apocalypse Opener.

The writer swore that this was a fool proof way to get laid. Just do it right with enough girls and one of them will bite. Okay, I’ll try it. I wasn’t lacking dedication. It goes like this:

Me: Hi, I’m Nick.

Her: Hi, I’m Girl A.

Me: What are you up to now?

Her: Blah blah, whatever.

Me: Would you like to come home with me?

The key (apparently) is to look her dead in the eye and hold your fucking ground. She’ll be taken aback and then scrutinise you briefly for any wavering. And then, sometimes, she’ll just agree.

Like most pick-up advice it’s really a part-completed sentence. The instructor says something like, “This really works” when the full sentence is “This really works… if you’re already the sort of guy who gets laid quite easily.” I tried it about twenty times and got nothing. Really, what did I expect? The most memorable of them was with a sexy Greek ballerina I had met walking outside the National Portrait Gallery in Charing Cross.

It was September 5th, 2009, Saturday afternoon and my mother was visiting London so I did the honourable thing and met her for lunch and coffee. I was totally open with her about my new hobby which she was obliquely supportive of. She was rather contemptuous of my ex-wife and viewed me as the aggrieved party. She’s also a psychologist and a realist so she wanted her son to get himself together and meet some girls. After she went off sight-seeing I met up with an Indian guy called Sai who had been winging with me recently to squeeze in an hour’s street work.

The very first girl I stopped was the Greek dancer. She had shoulderlength brown hair, slim muscular legs, and denim shorts. I got in front of her and opened:

“Hi! I had to stop you. You’re gorgeous.”

She smiled, muttered thanks, and I hit her with the ONE EASY STEP: “Would you like to come home with me?”

She smiled and said no. Ok, Plan B. “Um… okay. Is that coffee from Pret?” It was.

“Cool. I normally go to Starbucks myself. I like the coffee of the day though, to be honest, if I’m gonna spend a long time in a cafe I normally do Caffè Nero because they have those lovely distressed leather sofas… blah blah… bullshit.”

One of London’s great daygame beats

She invited me to walk with her, and we headed down to Trafalgar Square.